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HR Professionals and Community Engagement: What Could Partnerships Look Like? May 17th, 2013

The opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of Endeavour.

This blog post is the final part of three by Endeavour board member Dave Nanderam, President, TapestryBuilder. To read Dave’s previous posts, visit:

• Part one: HR Professionals and Community Engagement: Profession Benefits
• Part two: HR Professionals and Community Engagement: Employer Benefits

Are you thinking of promoting a high potential individual to a leadership role? Send him/her and their potential direct reports on a Habitat for Humanity build. The build environment can offer additional insights regarding working relationship dynamics and personality traits to guide the organization’s talent management investment. Compare this opportunity cost to more conventional corporate team-building programs.

Want to provide opportunities to build performance capabilities? Help employees source  non-profits (NPs) in their communities that require technical expertise (e.g. marketing, communications, finance, human resources (HR)). Through the experience, they will gain insights from applying their problem-solving capabilities in different work contexts. The employer benefits thanks to a higher performing human capital team.

Corporate commitment to community engagement is not a passing fad. Organizations are increasingly realizing the value of this business/community connection as a management tool for supporting longer term shareholder value. Increasingly Gen X/Y employees are expecting their employers to have an active community engagement focus (e.g. structured HR programs) for enabling community impact. In the absence of these opportunities they are increasingly turning to intermediaries like Endeavour[5] and Jericho Roads Project[6] as a means of channeling their community engagement energy.  These intermediaries can complement HR’s role in developing cross-sector partnerships through their sector intelligence.

The HR profession is well positioned as the intermediary for integrating employer objectives, employee expectations and community needs. By rising to this challenge, the HR function can create measurable returns on investment for key stakeholder groups and further elevate the profession’s status.

If you have questions for how to enhance your non-profit’s HR team, leave a comment below.

[5] https://www.endeavourvolunteer.ca/

[6] http://www.jerichoroadproject.org/

This blog post was originally featured on tapestrybuilder.com. We’ve re-published it here in three parts with permission.

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